d="u92d41d12-1de5-5e9a-9364-802a4cb27ae2">
ASK A POLICEMAN
BY
ANTHONY BERKELEY
MILWARD KENNEDY
GLADYS MITCHELL
JOHN RHODE
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
&
HELEN SIMPSON
COPYRIGHT
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This 80th anniversary edition published in 2012
First published in Great Britain by Arthur Barker Ltd 1933
Copyright © The Detection Club 1933, 2012
The Authors asserts the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007468621
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007468652
Version: 2018-08-06
CONTENTS
Foreword: Ask a Detective Writer by Martin Edwards
Preface: Detective Writers in England by Agatha Christie
DEATH AT HURSLEY LODGE BY JOHN RHODE
I. MRS. BRADLEY’S DILEMMA BY HELEN SIMPSON
II. SIR JOHN TAKES HIS CUE BY GLADYS MITCHELL
III. LORD PETER’S PRIVY COUNSEL BY ANTHONY BERKELEY
IV. THE CONCLUSIONS OF MR. ROGER SHERINGHAM. BY DOROTHY L. SAYERS
“IF YOU WANT TO KNOW—” BY MILWARD KENNEDY
FOREWORD
ASK A DETECTIVE WRITER
By MARTIN EDWARDS
ASK A POLICEMAN, first published in 1933, was the fourth in a sequence of collaborative mysteries produced in quick succession by members of the Detection Club. The Club was set up three years before this book was written, as an elite and rather secretive social network of leading detective novelists. It continues to flourish to this day, although current members include prominent thriller and espionage writers as well as specialists in the whodunit.
Ask a Policeman followed two radio serials, Behind the Screen and The Scoop, and a full-length detective novel, The Floating Admiral. These collective ventures generated enough revenue for the Club to rent premises in Soho, where, as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, members convened “chiefly for the purpose of eating dinners together and of talking illimitable shop.”
In the early Thirties, detective fiction was hugely popular, and many writers treated the detective story as a game in which they pitted their wits against their readers’. It was supposed to be important to “play fair”. Father Ronald Knox, a founder member of the Club, went so far as to devise a jokey Decalogue of ten commandments for the genre (“not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, for instance)—which he and his colleagues were happy to break whenever it suited them.
Anthony Berkeley, who organized the dinner meetings that led to the foundation of the Club, and Dorothy L. Sayers, a towering presence in its ranks, headed a group of talented crime writers who became increasingly determined to explore criminal psychology and write novels of literary merit. Yet they too relished the intellectual exercise of creating elaborate puzzles.
Writing a round-robin mystery presents a variety of challenges for any team of authors, and Club members had to decide how to top the success of The Floating Admiral. Their answer was to come up with a fresh concept—they would write a story in which they exchanged
